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This workshop on 'The Timing of Grammar: Experimental and Theoretical Considerations' precedes the 35th GLOW Colloquium, which will take place from 28-30 March 2012 at the University of Potsdam, Germany. The workshop is jointly organised by Harald Clahsen and Claudia Felser.

The workshop examines the real-time application of grammatical constraints during language processing, and how these interact with other types of constraints such as selectional restrictions, discourse-pragmatic biases, or cognitive resource limitations. Our focus will be on constraints which help determine the interpretation of overt or covert anaphoric elements.

Theoretical linguists have identified a set of grammatical principles or constraints - such as the principles of binding theory, or island constraints - which are thought to restrict the search for an antecedent for pronouns, or for silent copies of moved constituents. These constraints are known to interact with other types of constraints during language comprehension and production, however, and have also been shown to be violable. The apparent violability of grammatical constraints is often attributed (by linguists) to 'processing factors' without necessarily being explicit about what exactly these may be. Using timecourse-sensitive experimental methods allows us to gain a better understanding of how grammatical and non-grammatical constraints interact during moment-by-moment language processing, and to examine at what point during processing grammatical constraints are applied, or potentially overridden by other types of constraints.

The invited speaker is Patrick Sturt (University of Edinburgh).

Call for Papers:

The workshop will provide a forum for discussing the timing of grammatical constraints from both experimental and theoretical perspectives. Abstracts are invited which may examine any type of anaphoric (or cataphoric) dependency, including movement dependencies. We also welcome contributions that investigate the timecourse of language processing in children, nonnative speakers, or language-impaired populations.